Now that Yom Kippur has ended, we have four days to build a sukkah for the next Jewish holiday, the week of Sukkot.
In sukkot you must dwell seven days; all the natives in Israel must dwell in sukkot, so that your generations will know that I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot when I brought them out from the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 23:42-43)
sukkot (סֻכּוֹת) = plural of sukkah(סֻכָּה) = hut, shack, temporary shelter constructed on-site (not a tent).
The Talmud tractate Sukkah establishes that a kosher sukkah has three walls, and a roof made of plant material only, preferably branches. The roof has to have more shade than sunlight. A later tradition says that the roof also has to have openings big enough to see stars through the branches at night. Some Jews sleep in their sukkah (in good weather). It’s more important to eat meals in the sukkah—but not when it’s pouring rain. Because Sukkot is also called Zeman Simchateinu, the Season of Our Rejoicing.
Leather or any substance from an animal is prohibited in the roof of the sukkah. But the walls can be made out of any temporary materials, as long as they are at least ten handspans (32 inches) tall, and at most 30 feet tall.1 Since a sukkah is open on one side, small living animals can wander in and out. But in the Talmud tractate Sukkah, the rabbis discuss camels and elephants in relation to a sukkah.
Camels
Boat sukkah in Venice
A sukkah was often built on the flat roof of a house in ancient Israel, but the Talmud says it can also be built on the deck of a ship.
If you are traveling overland, can you build your sukkah on a camel? The Talmud reports the opinions of two rabbis.
“In the case of one who establishes his sukkah atop an animal, Rabbi Meir deems it fit and Rabbi Yehuda deems it unfit. The Gemara asks: What is the rationale for the opinion of Rabbi Yehuda? The Gemara answers that it is as the verse states: “You shall prepare for yourself the festival of Sukkot for seven days” (Deuteronomy 16:13), from which Rabbi Yehuda derives: A sukkah that is suitable for seven days is called a sukkah, while a sukkah that is not suitable for seven days is not called a sukkah. It is prohibited to climb upon an animal on the first day of the festival of Sukkot, and therefore a sukkah atop an animal is unfit, as it cannot be used all seven days.
“And Rabbi Meir, who holds that the sukkah is fit, would say: By Torah law, thissukkahis also suitable for use on a Festival and on Shabbat, as there is no Torah prohibition against using an animal on those days, and it is the Sages who issued a decree prohibiting it. The fact that it is prohibited by rabbinic decree does not render the sukkah unfit.” 2
Imagine a camel with a narrow sukkah strapped to its back for seven continuous days! Camels can be trained to carry loads, but they are also cranky animals.
Elephants
The Talmud continues:
“However, if one utilized his animal as a wall for a sukkah and did not establish the entire sukkah atop the animal, Rabbi Meir deems it unfit and Rabbi Yehuda deems it fit … What is the rationale for the opinion of Rabbi Meir, who rules that an animal is unfit for use as a partition in areas of halakha where a partition is required? Abaye said: It is due to the concern lest the animal die, leaving the sukkah without a wall. Rabbi Zeira said: It is due to the concern lest it flee. The Gemara explains the practical halakhic differences between the two opinions. In the case where one established a wall with a tied elephant, everyone agrees that the sukkah is fit, as even if it dies and falls, its carcass still has a height of ten handbreadths and is fit for the wall of a sukkah.
“… In the case where one established a wall with an elephant that is not tied, everyone agrees that the sukkah is unfit lest it flee. Where they disagree is in the case of a tied animal. … The Gemara asks: But according to all opinions, isn’t there the space between its legs, which is like a breach in a wall? How can one establish a partition whose breached segment exceeds its standing segment? The Gemara answers: He establishes a partition for it by filling the gaps with hard palm leaves and laurel leaves, sealing the breach.
“… The Gemara asks further: And even though there is no concern lest the animal die, perhaps it will crouch, leaving a wall that is less than ten handbreadths? The Gemara answers: It is referring to a case where the animal is tied with ropes from above so that it cannot crouch.”3
Imagine an elephant so tame that it would suffer being tied with ropes from above as well as front and back, with hard palm leaves sticking into its belly as it stood still for seven days and nights! Even if a supply of food were kept within reach of its trunk, no elephant would put up with that level of discomfort. Before anyone had time to eat a single bite inside a sukkah with a live elephant as one wall, I am sure that elephant would charge away, dragging the sukkah behind it.
But Talmudic discourse considers even remote possibilities in order to determine whether they would be legal according to halakhah, Jewish law.
The elephant in the room
Probably the Talmudic rabbis used an elephant as an example because it is the biggest land animal on earth. That is also why, when an issue is so huge that everybody is constantly aware of it, yet nobody says anything about it, we use the English idiom “the elephant in the room”. You cannot overlook an elephant.
Is there a figurative elephant in the sukkah today?
So far, Jews in most countries can still build sukkot out in their yards, and eat under the roofs of branches to celebrate the harvest season, to remind us that our homes and our lives are impermanent, and to enjoy ourselves. But is there something too big to ignore that we are refusing to look at?
The elephant in the sukkah might be climate change, and the eventual death of many of the trees whose branches we now collect for our sukkah roofs. It might be autocratic governments that stir up hatred against minority groups, hatred that will make it unsafe to celebrate our holidays outside.
The trick is to respond realistically to the elephant, yet still take the time to make the week of Sukkot a Zeman Simchateinu, a season for rejoicing.
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 23a, translated by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, William Davidson Edition (digital), www.sefaria.org. (I changed the transliteration of סֻכָּה from sukkato sukkah.)
Yom Kippur means “Day of Atonement”; the root verb kapar, כָּפַר = atone, reconcile; cover over. It falls on the tenth of the month of Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar; this year Yom Kippur begins on Sunday evening, and continues until nightfall on Monday. On this solemn holy day, Jews confess their collective misdeeds over the past year, and try to return to being “at one” with God.
Why do we need atonement, and how do we do it?
The answer in the Torah and the Talmud is different from the answer in the Yom Kippur liturgy that has evolved over the past two millennia.
Atonement in Torah and Talmud
In the Torah, the Israelites need to achieve atonement with God because they have transgressed some of God’s laws or commandments, advertently or inadvertently. These commandments include ethical rules, rules for religious observance, and cultural norms. The Torah assumes that even the priests, who are charged with teaching everyone else God’s rules, cannot manage to follow all 613 laws1 all year without errors!2
Sending Out the Scapegoat, by William James Webb, 19th century
The book of Leviticus outlines the Yom Kippur ritual that presumably was followed at the first temple in Jerusalem (10th century to 587 CE). In brief, the high priest slaughters a bull and a goat, and sprinkles their blood on the outside altar and inside the innermost sanctum, the Holy of Holies.3 Then he lays his hands on the head of a second goat, and confesses that all the people have committed errors in observing God’s rules. This act transfers the Israelites’ misdeeds to the goat. Finally, a designated man sends the goat away “to Azazel” in an inaccessible part of the wilderness. (See my post Acharey Mot: Azazel.) The Israelites must fast and refrain from all labor on Yom Kippur while their misdeeds are being atoned for.4 At the end of the day, all the Israelites and their sanctuary have been purified; the invisible residue of disobeying God has been cleaned off and ritual purity is restored, so all the Israelites are at one with God again.
The Talmud tractate Yoma describes Yom Kippur rituals added during the time of the second temple in Jerusalem (516 to 70 CE). The only major change is that the designated man pushed the goat for Azazel (the goat carrying the Israelites’ misdeeds) off a nearby cliff to die, instead of setting it free in an inaccessible place.5
Atonement without a temple
The procedure for achieving atonement changed after sacrificial temple services were replaced with prayer services. Before Yom Kippur begins, Jews confess, apologize, and make amends (as much as possible) for the wrongs we have personally done to other people. Then during Yom Kippur we work on atonement with God, through prayer services in the evening and from morning to sundown the next day.
Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, by Maurycy Gottlieb, 19th century
A temple is not required; Yom Kippur is observed all over the world wherever Jews gather to pray. Although rabbis and cantors usually lead the prayers, neither of these functionaries is required; any knowledgeable Jews can lead, and all congregants and encouraged to join in. No animals are harmed, and no blood is involved. The ritual objects are the Torah scroll and one long-burning candle. Special prayers inserted into the regular liturgy include confessions that all of us have committed unethical acts. We pray for God to forgive us, take us back, and let us live for another year. Observant Jews also fast and refrain from all labor on Yom Kippur. At the end of the day, we hope we have achieved teshuvah(תְּשׁוּבָה) = return: turning around, returning to God, or returning to our God-given souls.
What misdeeds do we atone for?
In Leviticus, the high priest transfers three kinds of sins or misdeeds to the goat that is headed for the wilderness.
And Aaron [the high priest] will lean both his hands on the head of the living hairy goat, and he will confess on it all the avonot of the Israelites and all their pesha-im for all their chatat. And he will place them on the head of the hairy goat, and send it away by the hand of a designated man into the wilderness. Then the hairy goat will carry all their avonot on itself to a separated land; he will send out the hairy goat into the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:21-22)
avonot(עֲוֹנֺת) = intentional deeds that are crooked or wrong, in a social or religious sense; guilt for committing such deeds. (From the root verb avah, עָוָה = do wrong, pervert, twist.)
pesha-im(פְּשָׁעִים) = rebellions against a ruler—a suzerain country, a king, or God; guilt for rebellions against God.
chatat(חַטָּאת) = violation of social norms, civil law, or God’s laws, whether inadvertent or deliberate; guilt for such violations. (From the root verb chata, חָטָא = miss the mark, offend, fall short of a standard; be guilty.)
These three categories cover a lot of offenses against other people and against God. The Hebrew Bible never says exactly what the high priest confessed on the head of the goat. The Talmud says he used these words:
“Aviti, pashati, and chatati.”6
aviti(עָוִיתִי) = I have done wrong, I have perverted, I have been crooked. (From the Rabbinic Hebrew root verb avi, עָוִי, which came from the Biblical Hebrew root avah.)
pashati(פָּשַׁעְתִּי) = I have rebelled, I have been an apostate, I have deliberately violated God’s law. (A Rabbinic Hebrew verb from the same root as pesha-im.)
chatati(חָטָאתִי) = I have been mistaken, I have done wrong. (A Rabbinic Hebrew verb from the same root as chatat.)
So according to the Talmud, the high priest used to lay hands on the goat’s head and speak the same three words used in the description in Leviticus. The only new information is that the high priest used to say “I”; he took personal responsibility for all the Israelites.
The Yom Kippur liturgy of the past fourteen centuries includes somewhat more specific confessions, which all congregants make on behalf of all Jews (or in some liberal congregations, on behalf of all human beings). We chant the Vidui (“confession”) up to ten times during the prayer services. The two main prayers of the Vidui are the Ashamnu and the Al Cheit. Both use the first person plural, indicating that we have done these things, and we are collectively responsible.
Ashamnu(אָשַׁמְנוּ) = we have become guilty.
The Ashamnu is an acrostic; there is one word or two-word phrase for each of the first 21 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and three for the 22nd and final letter. As we chant them, many Jews lightly beat their breasts. Here is a translation:
We have become guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander. We have been crooked [from the same root as avonot], and we have caused wickedness, we have been arrogant, we have been violent, we have smeared others with falsehoods. We have counseled evil, we have deceived, we have scoffed, we have revolted, we have been disrespectful, we have been stubborn, we have been perverse, we have rebelled [from the same root as pesha-im], we have persecuted, we have been stiff-necked. We have been wicked, we have ruined, we have loathed, we have strayed; you have let us go astray.
We are responsible for doing these things; but God let us do them.
All of these bad deeds can be read as ethical transgressions: actions that harm other people. Only a few of them can also be read as failure to worship God properly.
Al Cheit(עַל חֵטְא) = about wrongdoing, about missing the mark, about falling short. (From the same root as chatat.)
The Al Cheit is also an acrostic, but each letter gets a whole couplet, making it a much longer confession. Every line begins “About the wrongdoing that we have done wrong before you” and continues by describing either a motivation or a misdeed. For example, the first couplet says: “About the wrongdoing that we have done wrong before you under duress or willingly; and about the wrongdoing that we have done wrong before you through hardness of heart.”
The final couplet says: “About the wrongdoing that we have done wrong before you concerning extending a hand; and about the wrongdoing that we have done wrong before you through confusion of mind.”
The chant is interrupted twice by a sentence sung to a different melody:
For all these, God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, atone for us!
We sing this plea again at the end of the Al Cheit.
The method of finding atonement with God has completely changed since the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Instead of depending on a priest and two goats to trigger atonement for us, Jews depend on our own prayers—and our inner orientation and good deeds.
Another Yom Kippur prayer, the Unetaneh Tokef, 7 considers God’s decisions for the coming year, especially “who will live and who will die”, and then declares:
But turning, and praying, and doing the right thing can overturn the badness of the decree.
We hope to become at one with God by teshuvah (turning around our inner orientation), tefillah (praying), and tzedakah (acting ethically, especially regarding social justice). And just as our confessions say “we” have done wrong, we seek atonement for everyone.
For the last two millennia, we have no longer asked God to forgive us for errors in temple worship. But we still beg God to forgive us, as a group, for crooked deeds (avonot), for revolts against legitimate authority (pesha-im), and for falling short in our interactions with other people (chatat).
When we sincerely ask for forgiveness for everyone, our hearts open, and we become kinder, more forgiving, more ethical, more at one.
Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, a.k.a. Rambam) combed through the Torah in the 12th century CE and found 613 commandments from God. His list remains the standard in the Jewish world, although 342 of them cannot be performed without a temple in Jerusalem.
Leviticus 16:11 says that the high priest must slaughter a bull first in order to atone for himself and his own family.
Leviticus 16:15-19.
Leviticus 16:2-34, 23:23-32; Numbers 29:1-11.
The temple rituals are described in detail in Talmud Bavli, tractate Yoma.
Talmud Bavli, Yoma 36b.
Unetaneh Tokef is sung at the end of the Amidah in the Musaf service, which usually occurs in the early afternoon of Yom Kippur.
A new year in the Jewish calendar, 5787, begins this Friday evening with two days of Rosh Hashanah prayer services—and the blowing of the shofar.
Wm. Carpenter blowing a shofar in sunlight
shofar(שֺׁפָר, שׁוֹפָר) = A ram or goat horn with the tip cut off and modified slightly so that it can be blown like a natural trumpet, buzzing one’s lips against the mouthpiece. (Plural: shofarot, שׁוֹפָרוֹת.)
Every shofar has a different pitch, depending on the size and shape of the animal’s horn. An experienced shofar blower can get two different notes. But unlike a natural trumpet, a shofar is never played with other instruments.
The first time anyone hears a horn blowing in the Hebrew Bible is at God’s revelation on Mount Sinai.
And it happened on the third day, in the morning; and there was thunder, and lightning flashes, and a heavy cloud on the mountain, a very strong sound of a shofar. And all the people that were in the camp trembled. (Exodus 19:16)
The sound of a shofar is also part of a divine manifestation in the book of Zechariah.1 But elsewhere in the bible, human beings blow the shofar. In the book of Joshua, shofar blowing makes the walls of Jericho fall down.2 King David has the shofar blown when he brings the ark into his new capital in Jerusalem.3 The shofar is often blown as a signal in battle,4 to rally troops,5 to sound a general alarm6, and to inaugurate a king7. The sound of the shofar means that something important is about to happen, and everyone should pay attention!
In four verses, the Hebrew Bible calls for shofar blowing to announce a holy day. One of these occasions only happens every fiftieth year, on Yom Kippur. Then the book of Leviticus prescribes shofar blasts to announce the year of Yoveil (“Jubilee” in English), when all Hebrew slaves are freed and all farmlands are returned to the families that originally owned them.8 The shofar is also blown to announce the more ancient festival days observed every new moon and every full moon.9
And two biblical verses call for blowing the shofar on the first day of the month of Tishrei. But neither verse says why the first day of Tishrei is holy.
Tishrei 1 in Leviticus
In the seventh month, on [day] one of the month, will be [like] a Shabbat-observance for you, a zikheron by a blast, a holy convocation. Any servile work you must not do. You must bring a fire-offering to God. (Leviticus 23:24-25)
Sometimes the first day of the month of Tishrei is called Yom HaZikheron (“Day of the Reminder”), but the bible never says what the day is a reminder of. The text continues with the next holy day in the calendar:
However, on the tenth of this seventh month, it is Yom HaKipurim. A holy convocation will be for you, and you must afflict your throats [fast], and you must bring a fire-offering to God. And you must not do any work at all this day, because it is Yom HaKipurim, lekhapeir for you in the presence of God, your God. (Leviticus 23:27-28)
Yom HaKipurim(יוֹם הַכִּפֻּרִים) = Day of the Atonements (now called “Yom Kippur”). (From the root verb kapar, כָּפַר = atone, reconcile; cover over.)
lekhapeir(לְכַפֵּר) = to make atonement, to make a reconciliation; to cover over. (Also from the root verb kapar.)
Since the first day of the month of Tishrei is Yom HaZikheron (“Day of the Reminder”), perhaps it is a reminder that Yom Kippur is only ten days away. Blowing the shofar might remind people to prepare for Yom Kippur. But holding a holy convocation with extra offerings at the altar implies something more.
Tishrei 1 in Numbers
No zikheron (reminder) is mentioned when the first of Tishrei comes up in a list of holy days in the book of Numbers.
And in the seventh month, on [day] one of the month, a holy convocation will be for you. You must not do any servile work. A day of a blast it will be for you. (Numbers 29:1)
Here, the text continues with the usual itemization of additional offerings at the altar for a particular holy day—in this case, one bull, one ram, seven lambs, and flour mixed with oil,
And one hairy goat, a guilt offering, lekhapeir for you. (Numbers 29:5)
This is not the goat chosen by lot in the ancient Yom Kippur ritual, but just an animal used in a general guilt offering. Still, the verse does introduce the idea of atonement for guilt.
Rosh Hashanah
What instrument is supposed to be blown to make the blasts on the first day the month of Tishrei? Neither of these Torah passages says. The ancient Israelites blew blasts on both a shofar and a metal trumpet. After the fall of the second temple in 70 CE, the rabbis decided that the shofar was blown on the first day of Tishrei.
They also (in a divided opinion) decided that the first of Tishrei was the first day of the year: Rosh Hashanah (“Head of the Year”), even though it was the seventh month after Nissan, the rabbis’ other candidate for the beginning of the year. (A whole tractate of the Babylonian Talmud is devoted to Rosh Hashanah.)
And why is the first day of the year a holy convocation, holy enough to suspend most kinds of work for the day? The Talmud says that it is because ten days later we observe Yom Kippur, the annual day to return to God and to pray for God to forgive our misdeeds of the past year.
So the shofar blowing on Rosh Hashanah announces the next holy day, sounds a general alarm that we need to wake up and turn back to God, and annually inaugurates God as the king of all living beings.10 (The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is full of references to God as king.)
Services with shofar blasts
Rosh Hashanah begins with an evening service, continues the next day with a long series of prayer services and a late afternoon Tashlikh ritual, then goes on for a second long day of services.
The morning services are similar to Shabbat morning services, but they have Rosh Hashanah additions to the liturgy, and especially juicy Torah and hafatarah readings.11 Then there is a short Shofar service before the Musaf (“Additional”) service. Both the Shofar Service and the Musaf service include shofar blasts (unless the day is Saturday, since the Talmud ruled that the shofar should not be blown on Shabbat).12
In the Musaf service, three special sections are embedded in the repetition of the Amidah (“Standing prayer”). These sections are titled Malkhuyot (“kingships”), Zikhronot (“reminders”), and Shofarot (“shofars”). Each section begins with biblical verses applying its theme to God, followed by shofar blasts, followed by singing.
According to the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva said that God said: “And recite before Me on Rosh Hashanah verses that mention Kingships, Remembrances, and Shofarot: Kingships so that you will crown Me as King over you; Remembrances so that your remembrance will rise before Me for good; and with what will the remembrance rise? It will rise with the shofar.”13
Malkhuyot
Rosh Hashanah services add many references to God as king, since this is the season of divine judgement. The Malkhuyot section of the Musaf service includes this exultant verse from the ancient Song of the Sea in the book of Exodus: God will reign forever and ever! (Exodus 15:18) Every year, we symbolically coronate God as our king once again, with blasts of the shofar.
Zikhronot
The sound of the shofar may startle us into remembering God, but on Rosh Hashanah we ask God to remember us and let us live another year. So the Zikhronot section includes the story of the binding of Yitzchak (“Isaac”) and God’s substitution of a ram for the sacrifice, and a prayer that the ram’s horn (shofar) will remind God of this act of mercy.
Shofarot
In the Shofarot section, we tell the story of how God manifested to the people at Mount Sinai with the sound of the shofar.
On Rosh Hashanah, someone blows the shofar, and everyone hears the sound of the blasts. Some of the liturgy imagines God hearing us blow the shofar, then being moved by our allegiance, remembering the old love for us, and returning to us as a father and king.
When we human beings hear the shofar, we wake up, straighten up, and remember God. We, too, work on teshuvah, which means “returning”. In traditional language, we need to return to God. In modern language, we need to return to the good soul inside us, to whom we really want to be.
It is easy to drift away from God, or from the good. What will sound the alarm to bring you back?
The prophet Yonah (“Jonah” in English) rebels against God’s order to deliver a prophecy in Nineveh, and flees from God by taking a ship all the way to the distant land of Tarshish. He tries to travel from Israel to the ends of the earth in order to avoid the presence of God.
The prophet who wrote the second half of Isaiah, however, prophecies that ships from Tarshish will bring riches to Jerusalem. This prophet exults in the idea that foreigners will travel from the ends of the earth in order to come close to the presence of God. (For both stories, see last week’s post, Hafarat Ki Tavo—2 Isaiah: Tarshish.)
The ends of the earth come up again, even more poetically, in the Torah portion Nitzavim (Deuteronomy/Devarim, 29:9-30:20), the first of this week’s double portion. Moses says that when the Israelites are unfaithful to their God, then God will cause them to be conquered and deported to other lands. But when their minds and hearts return to God—
Then God, your God, will return your captives and take you back in love, and collect you from all the peoples where God, your God, has scattered you. If you are banished to the ends of the heavens, from there God, your God, will collect you, and from there will take you. And God, your God, will bring you to the land that your forefathers possessed, and you will possess it; and [God] will do you good and multiply you more than your forefathers. (Deuteronomy 30:3-5)
Here “the ends of the heavens” is a poetic way of saying “farther than the ends of the earth”—even farther than Tarshish.
Yet God’s dwelling-place is the portable sanctuary the Israelites build in the book of Exodus, then the temple in Jerusalem.1 How can God find us at the ends of the earth? Psalm 139 teaches that escaping God’s guidance—or God’s demands—is impossible because God knows every mind and is present everywhere.
Omniscient: Psalm 139:1-4
The God character in the book of Genesis hears about events on earth, but sometimes needs a closer look to find out what humans are actually doing and thinking. In the story of the Tower of Babel,
God came down to look at the city and the tower that the humans had built. (Genesis 11:5)
When God is considering destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, God says:
“I will go down and I will see; if they have done according to the outcry that has come to me, annihilation! And if not, I will know.” (Genesis 18: 21)
But in the later psalms, God is less anthropomorphic. The first four verses of Psalm 139 express the concept that God is omniscient, at least when it comes to human minds.
God, you have examined me, and you know me. You know my sitting down and my standing up. You discern my purpose from afar. You sift through my way of life and my lying down, And you are familiar with all my paths. For there is no word on my tongue— Hey, God you know it completely. (Psalm 139:1-4)
Unlike God, another human being can observe you sitting, standing, lying down, and talking, but cannot discern your thoughts. Someone who knows you well can guess at your thoughts by considering your words, your body language, and your past deeds, but it is only a guess.
For God, it is not guesswork. According to Hirsch, God can reliably predict what we will think: “Even before the thought has actually taken form within me, You [God] can already see it by inference from Your previous knowledge of all my personality and the interaction of all my character traits.”2
Or maybe God is a mind-reader, and knows our thoughts and intentions directly, even before we become conscious of them.3
Continuous: Psalm 139:5-6
Next, the psalm says that only God exists at all times. Humans keep going only as long as God is pushing them through time.
You confine me between achor and kedem, And you set your palm upon me. (Psalm 139:5)
achor(אָחוֹר) = back, behind (in time or space); west; future. (In Hebrew the future is what we cannot see because it is behind our backs.)
kedem(קֶדֶם) = in front (in time or space); east; past. (In Hebrew the past is what we can see right in front of us, because it has already happened.)
A human can remember the past and anticipate the future, but can only live in the present. Hirsch wrote: “Mine is only that infinitely brief span of the ‘present’ which is hardly long enough for me to be able to declare that I ‘am’. … it is only through You that I ‘am’.”4
Without God’s palm, a human being could not make it into the next moment.
Incomprehensible knowledge for me! Too high! I am not capable of it. (Psalm 139:6)
After declaring that God knows our innermost thoughts even before we do, and that we continue living only through God’s support, the psalmist brings in the concept of omnipresence.
Omnipresent: Psalm 139:7-12
Where could I go away from ruchekha? And where could I flee from paneykha? (Psalm 139:7)
ruchekha(רוּחֶךָ) ֹ= your wind, your air, your spirit, your disposition.
paneykha(פָּנֶיךָ) = your face, your front, your surface, your presence.
On one hand, God surrounds us like air. On the other hand, as Hirsch wrote, the spirit of God keeps on nudging us and moving us around.5
The word paneykha also has a double meaning: God’s presence is everywhere, and God’s “face” sees us everywhere.6
If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, there too.(Psalm 139:8)
The Hebrew Bible often speaks of God as living in the sky (the heavens) and manipulating the weather. This verse of Psalm 139 introduces the idea that God is also present in the underworld, where people “sleep” when they die.
I take wing at dawn; I come to rest at the end of the sea. Even there your hand guides me And your right hand holds onto me. (Psalm 139:9-10)
Alter explained: “The speaker imagines taking wind with the dawn as it appears in the east, then soaring with the sun on its westward path to the limits of the imagined world …”7
The “end of the sea” describes Tarshish even better than “the end of the earth”. No matter how far we travel, the psalmist says, God either guides us or grabs us.
It is also useless to try to hide in the dark from God.
If I say: “Surely darkness will screen me, And night will be light for me,” Even darkness is not dark for you, And night is as light as day; Darkness and light are the same. (Psalm 139:11-12)
Inside: Psalm 139:13
The next verse hints at why God is always present for every person.
Because you created khilyotai; You wove me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)
khilyoitai(כִלְיֺתָי) = my kidneys; my conscience.8
Hiding from God is like hiding from yourself. You can only hide from your own conscience temporarily.
When Psalm 139 ends, the psalmist has decided to embrace God’s intimate knowledge, constant presence, and guidance.
Search me, God, and know my mind; Examine me and know my thoughts. And see if I have a hurtful path; And guide me on a path for all time. (Psalm 139:23-24)
Some religious people and some atheists believe that God is either the irrational and punitive being that we see sometimes in the Hebrew Bible, and/or the author of the policy that “sinners” will burn forever in hell that we see sometimes in Christianity. That version of God strikes me as an immoral villain whom I would not want to be omniscient, omnipresent, or guided by.
Other people believe that God is benevolent, either the fair and merciful being we also see in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, and/or an omnipotent being who makes everything work out for the best in the (not too long) long run. This is a more reassuring version of an omniscient, omnipresent God who guides us (although we run into theological problems if we also claim God is omnipotent).
There are other versions of what God is. Some that say God is not “a being” at all, but rather the ground of being, or the source of creation. Others say that “God” is not even a noun, but rather a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. In Kabbalah, God is ein sof(אֵין סוֹף), “without end”. The Tanya explains: “No thought grasps you [God] at all.”9
The impossibility of defining God also appears in Psalm 139:6: “Incomprehensible knowledge for me! Too high! I am not capable of it.”
But even if we can have no general concept of God, we can think about a single aspect of God. What if we experience God as an inner guide who is omniscient and omnipresent? Then “God” is another way of referring to our own consciences. We cannot flee from this God because we cannot flee from our inner selves. But if we only listen, our conscience guides us.
In the Jewish calendar, we are approaching the High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, days dedicated to asking God’s pardon for our individual and collective misdeeds of the past year. Jews are called upon to apologize to other people and make amends for any ways that we have hurt them before Rosh Hashanah. Then during the High Holy Days, we apologize to God, and rededicate ourselves to following God’s guidance—which might be the same as the guidance of our consciences. This year, may we all return to God, or to our inner guide—not just on holy days, but in each present moment.
See my post Haftarat Ki Tavo—Isaiah: A Place for Feet.
19th-century Rabbi Samson Rasphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Tehillim, translation by Gertrude Hirschler, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2014, p. 1104.
This idea appears in Tehillim: The Book of Psalms with an Interlinear Translation, ed. by Rabbi Menachem Davis, Artscroll Series, Schottenstein Edition, 2001, p. 388; and also in Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The Steinsaltz Ketuvim, Koren Publishers, 2019, in www.sefaria.org.
Hirsch, p. 1106.
Ibid., p. 1107.
Ibid.
Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007, p. 480.
Babylonians destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., and Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 C.E. Both times, the temple was razed on the ninth or tenth day of the month of Av, in late summer. Tisha Be-Av, the ninth of Av, is a traditional day of mourning for Jews.
For seven weeks after that date, the Torah portions march uninterrupted through the book of Deuteronomy, but the accompanying haftarah readings from the Prophets feature prophecies that the temple will be rebuilt and Jerusalem will become the beacon of the world. All seven are from second Isaiah.1 This week’s haftarah is the sixth “haftarah of consolation”, Isaiah 60:1-22.2 The theme of this reading is that soon God will fill Jerusalem with light, glory, wealth, and fame. (See my post Ki Tavo & 2 Isaiah: Enlightenment.) The haftarah opens:
Arise! Brighten! For your light has come! And the glory of God shines upon you! (Isaiah 60:1)3
The prophet then declares that soon all the Israelites will return from their exile in other countries.
Raise your eyes and look around! All of them gather [and] come to you. Your sons will come from afar, And your daughters will be nursed at your side. (Isaiah 60:4)
Furthermore, people from other nations will bring gifts of homage to the rebuilt temple, and riches will pour into Jerusalem.
That is when you will look and you will beam, And your heart will tremble and expand; For the abundance of the seacoast will be turned over to you, The wealth of nations will come to you. (Isaiah 60:5)
The next two verses say that camel trains from Sheba will bring gold and frankincense, and people from the Arabian Peninsula and what is now southern Jordan will bring flocks. Then the prophet returns to the subject of coastlands:
The coastlands yearn for me, Ships of Tarshish in the lead, To bring your children from afar, And their silver and their gold with them ... (Isaiah 60:9)
Drawing of a galley ship based on a wall relief in Nineveh, ca. 700 BCE, by Austen Henry Layard
Tarshish(תַּרְשִׁישׁ) = an island or coastal country distant from Judah; a type of large galley trade ship suitable for a long sea voyage. A precious stone, either beryl or jasper. What are these ships of Tarshish?
Tarshish in Phoenician and Akkadian texts
A Phoenician inscription discovered on the island of Sardinia mentions a place called Tarshish.4 So does an Akkadian cuneiform text in the Neo-Assyrian city of Assur on the Tigris River. The Assyrian inscription lauding King Esarhaddon’s conquests in the 670’s B.C.E. includes: “All the kingdoms from [the islands] amidst the sea—from the country of Iadanan and Jaman as far as Tarshishi—bowed to my feet and I received heavy tribute.”5
Since Iadanan is Cyprus, and Iaman (Jaman) is Ionia (the coast and islands where Anatolia abuts the Aegean Sea), “Tarshishi” must be farther west. The Hebrew Bible mentions Tarshish 25 times, but the only clues it offers about the land’s location are that it is an island or coastline, it is far to the west of Israel, and it is a source of relatively rare metals. Scholars have speculated that Tarshish was a name for Crete, Carthage, Sardinia, or the Mediterranean coast of Iberia.
Tarshish as a source of luxuries
A prophecy in the book of Ezekiel predicting doom for the cosmopolitan Phoenician city of Tyre mentions Tarshish twice. The first reference is to Tarshish as a country.
Tarshishtrades with you because of your abundance of wealth. They give silver and iron and tin and lead for your wares. (Ezekiel 27:12)
The prophecy lists the goods that other countries bring to Tyre, including the kingdom of Judah, which trades wheat, fruit syrup, oil, and salve in exchange for other goods. Probably Judah obtains some of the metals from Tarshish in Tyre.6
The second reference to Tarshish is to a type of ship: very large ships for long voyages. As a major Mediterranean port, Tyre keeps a fleet of Tarshish ships.
The Tarshish ships journey with your merchandise, and you are filled and very heavy on the high seas. Your rowers bring you out into the great waters; the east wind shatters you on the high seas. Your wealth and your wares, your merchandise, your seamen and your navigators, those who repair your leaks, and the merchants of your merchandise, and all the warriors who are inside you, and all the company in your midst—they will fall down into the heart of the sea on the day of your downfall. (Ezekiel 27:25-27)
The moral of this prophecy, according to Steinsaltz, is that “Tyre’s insatiable desire to become richer will cause it to drown.”7
Earlier in the bible, the first book of Kings brags about the wealth of King Shlomoh (“Solomon” in English) by saying:
And all of King Shlomoh’s drinking cups were gold, and all the utensils of the Lebanon Forest House were of pure gold; silver was not thought of as anything in Shlomoh’s days. For the king had a Tarshish fleet on the sea, along with Hiram’s fleet. Once every three years, the Tarshish fleet came in, carrying gold and silver, ivory and apes and parrots. (1 Kings 10:21-22)
If a round-trip to Tarshish takes three years, it is a distant country, such as Spain, and requires many intermediate stops. But if King Shlomoh has a fleet of Tarshish ships, they might spend three years stopping at many ports, and bringing home choice goods from each.
Later in 1 Kings, King Yehoshafat (“Jehoshaphat” in English) of Judah—
—made Tarshish ships to go to Ofir for gold. But he did not go, because the ships were broken up at Etzyon Gaver. (1 Kings 22:49)
Here Tarshish refers to a type of ship rather than a country. Steinsaltz explained: “Tarshish was distant from Israel, and only large, strong ships with teams of rowers could sail there.”8 The location of Ofir is still unknown. But King Yehoshafat’s ships were wrecked at the Kingdom of Judah’s port on the Red Sea, now called Eilat. So the land of Ofir must have been on the Arabian Sea, not the Mediterranean.
Tarshish as a distant land
Perhaps the most famous biblical reference to Tarshish is in the book of Jonah. Yonah (“Jonah” in English) does not want to obey God and utter a prophecy in the city of Nineveh. So instead of heading inland to the northeast, toward Nineveh, Yonah heads west across the Mediterranean.
And Yonah got up to flee from God’s presence to Tarshish. And he went down to Yafo and found a ship going to Tarshish. And he paid the fare, and he went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from God’s presence. (Jonah 1:3)
He tries to go so far away—all the way to Tarshish!—that God will not find him. But flight is futile; God creates a storm that threatens to sink the ship, and after an undersea adventure, Yonah ends up in Nineveh after all.
Tarshish in Second Isaiah
What role do the ships of Tarshish play in this week’s haftarah reading from second Isaiah?
The coastlands yearn for me,
Ships of Tarshish in the lead,
To bring your children from afar,
And their silver and gold with them;
For the sheim of Y-H-V-H, your God,
For the Holy One of Israel, who gives you glory. (Isaiah 60:9)
sheim (שֵׁם) = name; reputation, fame.
Either the country of Tarshish, or coastal countries visited by Tarshish-style ships, will bring luxuries to the temple and the people in Jerusalem. But will the ships bring exiled Israelites as well?
According to Steinsaltz, when the people of the coastlands are yearning for the God of Israel, “The children [of Israelites] will not arrive as captives that have been redeemed in exchange for gold and silver, as their silver and their gold will be with them, like dignitaries bearing expensive goods.”9
But would any exiled Israelites use a coastal port?
When the Assyrian Empire defeated the Kingdom of Israel, its citizens were deported to Assyrian lands in northern Mesopotamia from 734-715 B.C.E.. When the Babylonian Empire defeated the Kingdom of Judah, its citizens were deported to Babylonia in central Mesopotamia from 597-582 B.C.E.. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were never conquered by, or deported to, any country on the Mediterranean or Arabian seas.
According to Alter, “This is an exercise of poetic license to convey the idea of the exiles being brought form afar because in fact they would be coming overland from Mesopotamia, not from the west by sea.”10
However, “The coastlands yearn for me” implies that the people of the seacoasts and islands will want to come to Jerusalem to honor the God of Israel, since the “name” or reputation God will spread all over the known world, all the way to Tarshish. And “Ships of Tarshish in the lead” might mean that long-distance ships will arrive at the nearest port (either Yafo on the Mediterranean or Etzyon Gaver on the Gulf of Aqaba) bearing gold, silver, and would-be worshipers, who would then travel overland to the inland city of Jerusalem. In that case, the only poetic license in the verse is used to call foreigners who want to honor the God of Israel the “children” of the Israelites.
And the name Tarshish indicates not only the size of the ships, and the luxuries they will bring, but also the distances that people will travel in order to reach Jerusalem and its temple.
Yonah (“Jonah”) wanted to travel to the ends of the earth in order to avoid the presence of God. But second Isaiah predicts that someday people will travel from the ends of the earth in order to come close to the presence of God.
(Next week I will examine Psalm 139 in terms of fleeing to, or arriving from, the land of Tarshish.)
Isaiah 1:1-39:8 consists of the prophecies of Yeshayahu (“Isaiah” in English) son of Amotz during the reigns of four kings of Judah, ending with King Yechizkiyahu (“Hezekiah” in English), who died in 687 B.C.E. Isaiah 40:1 begins sometime after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E Since this work by an unknown author was appended to the book of Isaiah, scholars call it “second Isaiah” or “Deutero-Isaiah”.
Some scholars date Isaiah 40:1-55:13 to the Babylonian exile, 587-538 B.C.E., and Isaiah 56:1-66:24 to the period after the Persians conquered Babylon and the Jews in Babylonia were allowed to return and rebuild Jerusalem and its temple.
The King James translation used in Handel’s Messiah is “Arise! Shine! For thy light has come! And the glory of God is risen upon thee!”
If tidor neder to God, your God … (Deuteronomy 23:22)
tidor(תִדֺּר) = you vow, you will vow. (A form of the verb nadar, נָדַר = made a vow.)
neder(נֶדֶר) = a vow. (Noun from the root verb nadar.)
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei (Deuteronomy/Devarim 21:10-25:19), advises against making any vows to God.
The Hebrew Bible distinguishes between vow and an oath. The noun neder appears 58 times in the bible, always as a vow made to God. (An oath is a shevuah(שְׁבוּעָה), and people never swear oaths to God, only to other people. God swears oaths to people in the Hebrew Bible, but never makes a neder.)
People in the Hebrew Bible vow to give God an animal sacrifice, or to give money to the Temple treasury. Another type of vow is to dedicate oneself to God for a fixed period of time as a nazir. A nazir separates him or herself from ordinary public life by refraining from haircuts, wine, and anything else made with grapes. (See my post Naso: Distanced by Hair.)
The Torah portion Ki Teitzei warns that if you do make a vow to God, you must carry it out without delay—but it is better to refrain from vowing in the first place.
If you vow a vow to God, your God, you should not delay in fulfilling it, because God, your God, will definitely require it from you, and you will have incurred guilt. But if you forego vowing, you will not incur guilt. What goes out from your lips, you must observe; and you do must do as you vowed to God, your God, voluntarily, as you spoke with your mouth. (Deuteronomy 23:22-24)
(There are so many variants of the verb nadar in this passage, I will use the English words for vowing a vow in the rest of this post.)
Before we examine the three verses separately, let’s look at why people in the Hebrew Bible make vows to God in the first place.
Conditional vows
Both conditional and unconditional vows appear in the bible. People make conditional vows when they hope that their vow will make God feel inclined to give them what they want.
by Francisco de Zurburan, 17th century
Rabbi Chaim Potok wrote: “A person who sought God’s aid in achieving a desired goal or relief from distress—the birth of a child, victory in battle, recovery from illness, escape from danger—might promise to do something pleasing to God afterward in gratitude for His assistance.”1
In three of the psalms, the speakers thank God for helping them win a battle, then say they will carry out their vows to make extra offerings at the altar.2 Presumably they made these vows before the battle, and will fulfill them when they return to the temple.
There are also three biblical stories about conditional vows. In the book of Genesis, Yaakov (“Jacob” in English) leaves home for the first time in his life, fleeing from a brother who wants to kill him. He dreams of angels going up and down a ramp between heaven and earth, with God standing above and promising to help him. When he wakes up,
Then Yaakov vowed a vow, saying: “If God will be with me, and watch over me on this way that I am going and will give me food to eat and a garment to wear, and if I come back safely to my father’s house, then Y-H-V-H will be my God, and this stone that I have set up as a standing-pillar shall become a house of God, and everything that you give me I will definitely tithe to you.” (Genesis 20:22)
Yaakov may be going overboard with all his conditions, but in the next story about a conditional vow, the man who vows does not make enough conditions. When Yiftach is about to lead his troops against the Ammonites,
Then Yiftach vowed a vow to God, and said: “If it is given—[if] you give the Ammonites into my hand—then it will be the one going out, that goes out from my door of my house to meet me when I return safely from Ammon, will be for God. And I will offer it up as a rising-offering.” (Judges 11:30-31)
Even the general of a small army might keep livestock in part of his compound, and Yiftach might have been imagining an animal coming out. He later regrets his vow, since the first thing that comes out of his door when he returns is his only child. (See my post Haftarat Chukat—Judges: A Peculiar Vow.)
In the first book of Samuel, Chanah (“Hannah” in English) desperately wants a baby. She walks up to the temple in Shiloh and prays.
And she vowed a vow, and she said: “Y-H-V-H of Armies, if you actually see the hardship of your maidservant, and you remember me and do not forget your maidservant, and if you grant your maidservant a male child, then I will give him to Y-H-V-H for all the days of his life, and no razor will go over his head.” (1 Samuel 1:11)
She seems to be vowing that if God gives her a son, she will make him a nazir. But after she has a son and has weaned him, she goes farther and gives him to the temple, where he becomes a prophet.
Unconditional vows
Making a vow to be a nazir is an unconditional vow; the nazir is willing to exercise self-restraint in order to be holy to God, and expects no special favors.
Another type of unconditional vow is the dedication of a future donation to God for no other reason than a generous or religious impulse. Leviticus 27:1-8 provides a price list for unconditional vows in which a man dedicates a member of his household as a donation, and then (instead of sacrificing the person, like Yiftach) gives the temple the value of that person in silver. (See my post Bechukotai: Gender, Age, and Personal Value.) This passage is followed by rules about unconditional vows of animals, of houses, and of land.3
No delay
The passage on vows in this week’s Torah portion begins by emphasizing that God will brook no delay in fulfilling a vow to God.
When you vow a vow to God, your God, you shall not delay in fulfulling it, because God, your God, will definitely require it from you, and you would have incurred guilt. (Deuteronomy 23:22)
If you vow to be a nazir, you begin at once. If you vow to bring an offering, you should do it as soon as it is feasible for you to go to the sanctuary or temple.
What counts as a delay? The Talmud decrees:
“Whether one makes a vow to bring an offering to the Temple, or consecrates an item to the Temple, or makes a valuation, promising to pay the value of a particular person to the Temple treasury, once three Festivals have passed from that day and he has not yet fulfilled his promise, he transgresses the prohibition … Rabbi Shimon says: One transgresses the prohibition against delaying not when any three Festivals have passed, but when three Festivals have passed in their proper order, i.e., Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, with Passover first.”4
So if you vow to bring something specific to the sanctuary or temple, you are in the clear even if you do not bring it until the autumn festival of Sukkot the following year. But if you wait longer than that, God will punish you. The classic commentary gives examples of God punishing a transgressor with death at sea, the death of one’s wife, and the death of one’s child.
Why is not fulfilling a vow to God such a terrible crime? For the ancient Israelites, a vow to God was holy. Therefore violating your vow was a desecration.
Anyone who vows a vow to God, or swears an oath to abstain an abstention for himself, he must not desecrate his word; according to anything that goes out of his mouth, he must do. (Numbers 30:3)
Bachya ben Asher explained: “Self-imposed vows … are holier than the ordinary commandments; this is why the Torah has to warn especially against not honoring them.”5
Better not to vow
The next verse in Ki Teitzei gives advice.
But if you forego vowing, you will not incur guilt. (Deuteronomy 23:23)
The book of Ecclesiastes repeats this advice, after calling anyone who delays fulfilling a vow a fool.
When you vow a vow to God, you must not delay in fulfilling it. For [God] has no pleasure in fools. What you vow, fulfill! Better that you do not vow, than that you vow and do not fulfill. (Ecclesiastes 5:3-4)
Ramban explained: “God has no pleasure in fools who think that they do a good deed when they utter many vows to serve as encouragement to fulfill a commandment which they plan to do, and they do not consider in their hearts … ‘Perhaps I will not be able to fulfill all these vows.’ Instead he thinks that the desire he had at the time of his vow will be accounted to him for good.”6
Bachya ben Asher sensibly concluded: “If one wants to bring an offering to God, one should do so at the time when one decides on it, without first making a vow about it.”7
Voluntary?
Next, this week’s Torah portion emphasizes that while some altar offerings are required, you act on your own initiative when you make a vow to God to donate something extra.
What goes out from your lips, you must observe; and you do must do as you vowed to God, your God, nedavah, as you spoke with your mouth. (Deuteronomy 23:24)
nedavah(נְדָבָה) = voluntarily, of your own free will; a voluntary offering.
People can silently plan to bring God an extra gift, but they have to speak out loud for the plan to count as a vow.
Why does this verse include the word nedavah? According to Chizkuni, the word nedavah fixes the blame on the person who made the vow. “‘as you have vowed, voluntarily.’ No one forced you to make such a vow, so that not honouring it, or delay in honouring it is entirely your fault.”8
However, by the 9th century C.E., long before the Spanish Inquisition, Jews in Spain were being forced to convert to either Christianity or Islam on pain of death. They wanted to make sure God would not hold them to account for their vows of conversion, and they began starting the evening of Yom Kippur with the Kol Nidrei (“All Vows” in Aramaic), a plea to God to cancel the whole community’s vows of the past year.
But the word nedavah in our verse may not be intended as a contrast with coerced vows. According to the Talmud, it provides a ruling about the method of slaughtering. “The verse indicates that if you … sacrificed your vow offering properly, it shall be a satisfactory vow offering; but if you did not sacrifice it properly, it shall be rendered a voluntary gift offering. Although it does not satisfy the obligation of your vow, it remains a valid offering.”9
And according to Chayim ibn Attar, “The Torah uses the expression nedavah to indicate the generous frame of mind you were in when you made this promise.”10
After the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem, the statements about vows in this week’s Torah portion were applied to other kinds of vows, and those who failed to fulfill their vows without undue delay were punished by a Jewish court instead of by God. For example, Bachya ben Asher wrote: “If the subject of the vow were charitable donations, the donor is most certainly forced to fork over what he had promised even if the court has to put up some of his property for sale to satisfy his vow. The delay permitted then is even shorter, as the poor people for whom the donations were intended cannot afford to wait.”11
When did you last make a vow? Today, a formal vow in public is usually reserved for a wedding, an oath of office, or swearing to tell the truth as a witness. In all of these cases, we are making a commitment to other people. If God is mentioned at all, God is invoked as a witness and support (“so help me God”). Even monastic vows are made to other people: to a religious community.
Failure to fulfill a vow or an oath makes all your future vows questionable, and therefore unreliable. Sometimes people fail to live up to their vows because of circumstances they could not have anticipated. Others are carried away by their emotions, and rashly promise more than they can realistically deliver. As the portion Ki Teitzei indicates, people who make rash vows end up behaving less ethically than those who refrain from vowing in the first place.
This is the first week of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Jewish tradition is to spend this month examining ourselves, apologizing and making amends for the wrongs we have done to other people, and recognizing where we have failed the God inside each of us.
This Elul, may we remember the promises we broke, and the good deeds we delayed too long. May we recognize and make amends for our failures to fulfill our vows to others.
Rabbi (and novelist) Chaim Potok, editor of p’shat commentary, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, the Rabbinical Assembly of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, New York, 2001, p. 1126.
Psalms 56:10, 13; 61:6, 9; and 66:13.
Leviticus 27:9-29.
Talmud Bavli, Rosh Hashanah 4a, translated by Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, William Davidson Talmud, digital edition, Koren Publishers.
14th-century rabbi Bachya ben Asher, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Ramban (acronym of 13th-century rabbi Moshe ben Nachman), translation in www.sefaria.org.
Bachya ben Asher, ibid.
13th century commentary Chizkuni, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Talmud Bavli, Zevachim 4b, translation by Steinsaltz, ibid.
18th-century rabbi Chayim ibn Attar, Or Hachayim, translation in www.sefaria.org.
In last week’s Torah portion, Re-eih, Moshe (“Moses” in English), the greatest prophet in the Hebrew Bible, warns the Israelites against future prophets who establish their credibility through a sign or a wonder, and then urge the people to serve other gods. These false prophets, he says, must be executed. (See my post Re-eih: False Prophets, Part 1.)
Shoftim: The next prophet
In this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim (Deuteronomy/Devarim 16:18-21:9), Moshe tells the Israelites:
… these nations of which you will be taking possession, they listen to sorcerers and to diviners. But you—not thus has God, your God, appointed you! God, your God, will raise up for you a prophet from your midst, from your kinsmen, like me. You must listen to him! (Deuteronomy 18:14-15)
Prophet, by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1902
A prophet in the Hebrew Bible is someone who delivers a message from God and/or speaks in ecstasy. (God also speaks to some people who are not prophets, giving them instructions, but not messages to pass on to others.) Moshe is saying that in the future God is going to turn another Israelite into a prophet, and the people had better listen to him or her, and not to any sorcerer or diviner. (The next prophet of God who shows up in the Hebrew Bible is Devorah in Judges 4:4. She is one of 23 individual prophets the Hebrew Bible mentions, four of them women.)
S.R. Hirsch explained the difference between a diviner and a true prophet:
“God sends us His prophet not in order that we may find out through him what we would like to know, but in order that he, the prophet, may tell us what God wishes us to know. The prophet is not our instrument; he is the instrument of God.”1
Moshe says that the Israelites should only listen to a prophet from your midst, from your kinsmen, like me. Bachya ben Asher wrote that like me is qualifying the phrase from your kinsmen “to exclude prophets who are from the descendants of Esau or Ishmael.”2 Only the descendants of Yaakov (“Jacob” in English), a.k.a. Yisrael (“Israel”) qualify as prophets for the Israelites.
Moshe was born to Israelite parents, but he is not exactly from your midst. He grew up as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, then married into a Midianite family before he saw the burning bush and God appointed him as a prophet. Moshe did not want to journey back to Egypt and live in the midst of the Israelites, serving as God’s prophet, but he did it.
So why did Moshe say “from your midst, from your kinsmen, like me”? According to Ramban, like me meant: “… you will believe in him just as you believe in me.”3 In the books of Exodus and Numbers, the Israelites did believe that Moshe spoke for God, though they did not always trust him (or God) to promote their welfare.
Shoftim: True or false
After repeating God’s promised to appoint a future prophet, Moshe quotes God as saying:
“… I will place my words in his mouth, and he will speak to them everything that I command him.And it will be: the man who does not listen to my words which he speaks in my name, I, myself, will call him to account. However, the man who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods—that prophet dies!” (Deuteronomy 18:18-20)
So God will punish both any Israelite who does not listen to a true prophet, and any prophet who speaks in God’s name but whose message does not come from God. Moshe adds:
And if you say in your mind: How do we know which is the word that YHWH did not speak?If the prophetshould speak in the name of God, and the thing does not happen, does not come about, it is the word that God did not speak. The prophet spoke it with presumption; you must not be awed by him. (Deuteronomy 18:21-22)
Then he moves on to a new topic.
In last week’s Torah portion, Re-eih, there are two requirements for believing a prophet: the signs or wonders that the prophet predicts must actually occur, and the prophet must not urge people to violate any of God’s laws. In this week’s portion, Shoftim, only the first requirement seems to apply. But a closer look reveals that Shoftim is not talking about signs and wonders, but about speaking in the name of God—invoking God’s four-letter name and then delivering a formal prophecy.
People might have to wait for years for a prophecy, as opposed to a sign or wonder, to come true.
Furthermore, the proof that Moshe offers could fail in two different ways: a false prophet (one who does not hear God’s words) might predict an event that occurs anyway, and a true prophet might predict an event that does not occur.
According to Ramban, even a false prophet might foresee the future. He wrote that: “there is a prophetic potential in the souls of some people by which they know of things to come without the person knowing whence it comes to him …”4
Therefore even if some events occur just as these people predict, it does not mean that God had told them what would happen. However, when prophets in the Hebrew Bible prophesy in the name of God, even though God has not spoken to them, their prophesies do not come true. But some of the prophecies that true prophets deliver in the name of God do fail to come true. The prophet Yirmeyahu (“Jeremiah” in English) explains why.
Jeremiah: Positive vs. negative prophecies
Jeremiah, by Rembrandt, 1630
Yirmeyahu (“Jeremiah”) was a prophet in Jerusalem who predicted the siege and fall of the city by the Babylonian army, which occurred in 589-587 B.C.E. His early prophecies warn the people of Judah to stop worshiping other gods and repent before God gives up on them. Meanwhile, other prophets in Jerusalem are telling people that everything will be okay even if they do not change. So Yirmeyahu says:
“Thus said the God of Armies: ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are being empty with you; they speak a vision from their own minds, not from the mouth of God. They actually say to those who spurn me: God said it will be well with you! And to everyone following his own stubborn mind, they say: No evil will come upon you!’” (Jeremiah 23:16)
After the Babylonians have seized Jerusalem, deported the king and other officials to Babylon, and begun sacking the temple, Yirmeyahu tells the ad-hoc king of Judah and the Israelites who remain in the city to accept the yoke of Babylon. He goes around wearing a wooden yoke as a reminder of his prophecy:
“Ko amar Y-H-V-H: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you, saying: ‘Hey, the furnishings of the House of God will be brought back now hastily from Babylon,’ for they prophesy falsely to you. Do not listen to them! Serve the king of Babylon, and live! Why should this city become a ruin?” (Jeremiah 27:16-17)
Ko amar(כֺּה אָמַר) = Thus said. (Ko amar Y-H-V-H is a formula indicating a formal prophecy.)
But the prophet Chananyah confronts Yirmeyahu in public at the temple.
And the prophet Chananyah took the yoke-bar up from the neck of the prophet Yirmeyahu, and he broke it. Then he spoke in front of the eyes of all the people, saying: “Ko amar Y-H-V-H of Armies, the God of Israel: ‘I shatter the yoke of the king of Babylon! In another two years, I will restore to this place all the furnishings of the House of God that Nebukhadnetzar, King of Babylon, took from this place and brought to Babylon. … and all the exiles of Judah who entered Babylon, I am bringing back to this place,’ declares God.” (Jeremiah 28:2-4)
Which prophet should the people believe, Chananyah or Yirmeyahu?
Yirmeyahu responds:
“Amen! Thus may God do! … However, please listen to this word that I speak in your ears and in the ears of all the people: The prophets who were before me and before you, from ancient times, they prophesied … war and evil and pestilence. The prophet who prophecies well-being—[only] when the word of the prophet comes to pass will it be known that God truly sent the prophet.” (Jeremiah 28:6-9)
Rambam explained:
“As to calamities predicted by a prophet, … the non-fulfilment of his forecast does not disprove his prophetic character. We are not to say, “See, he spoke and his prediction has not come to pass.” For God is long-suffering and abounding in kindness and repents of evil. It may also be that those who were threatened repented and were therefore forgiven, as happened to the men of Nineveh. Possibly too, the execution of the sentence is only deferred, as in the case of Hezekiah. But if the prophet, in the name of God, assures good fortune, declaring that a particular event would come to pass, and the benefit promised has not been realised, he is unquestionably a false prophet, for no blessing decreed by the Almighty, even if promised conditionally, is ever revoked … Hence we learn that only when he predicts good fortune can the prophet be tested.”5
Prophecies of bad fortune in the Hebrew Bible are plentiful. They do not all come to pass, but according to Yirmeyahu (“Jeremiah”) they should still be taken seriously. These prophecies are warnings from God, and the predicted disasters can be averted if people take action and change their ways in time. Perhaps the most famous example is when Jonah prophesies:
“Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4)
The Ninevites spend the next 40 days fasting, praying to God, and stopping the injustice they were doing. So God does not punish them after all.
Before the Babylonians beseiged Jerusalem, Yirmeyahu (“Jeremiah”) prophesied disaster if the Jerusalemites did not reform, but nobody repented. Now that the Babylonians have taken the city, Yirmeyahu is prophesying disaster if they do not accept Babylonian rule and cooperate with their new masters.
After Chananyah has broken the wooden yoke, God speaks to Yirmeyahu again, and he goes to Chananyah and says:
“Pay attention, please, Chananyah! God did not send you, and you—you have made this people trust in lies! Ko amar Y-H-V-H: ‘Here I am, casting you away from the face of the earth! This year you will die, because you spoke for defection from God.’” And the prophet Chananyah died that year, in the seventh month. (Jeremiah 28:15-16)
This proves that Yirmeyahu is the true prophet, and Chananyah is false. The people find out not because of any signs or wonders, but because one of Yirmeyahu’s prophecies in the name of God comes true.
While you are waiting to see whether a prophecy comes true, the best rule of thumb according to the book of Jeremiah is to believe the prophet who warns about disasters if you do not change your ways.
Today some people believe the words of televangelist preachers, modern prophets (though not descended from Israelites) who do speak in the name of God. People continue to believe these preachers even if none of their predictions come true. Why? My guess is that the believers crave the passionate emotion that goes with their faith that the preacher has a direct connection to God. They do not want to question whether the charismatic preacher’s words really reflect what God wants.
If I heard two men speaking in the name of God and giving opposite messages, I would not even try to decide which one was the true prophet—even if they were Jews, and even if one prophecy happened to come true. I would ignore both prophets, and figure out the best course of action on my own. But then, I do not live in a world with primitive science and an abundance of prophets, and I distrust over-the-top emotion. It is enough for me to feel a gentle connection with the divine from singing prayers and marveling at nature. And the only calls for repentance I listen to are in the Yom Kippur liturgy, and from my own strict conscience.
19th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Devarim, translated by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 420.
14th-century rabbi Bachya ben Asher, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Ramban (acronym of 13th-century rabbi Moshe ben Nachman), translation in in www.sefaria.org.
Ramban, ibid.
Rambam (acronym of 12th-century rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, a.k.a. Maimonides), Yesodei haTorah 10:4, translated by Jonathan Sacks in Covenant & Conversation, “Testing Prophecy: Shoftim”, 2013.
How do you know whether to believe someone who claims to receive supernatural messages?
This question appears in two different Torah portions in the book of Deuteronomy, Re-eih (this week’s portion) and Shoftim (next week’s portion)—with different answers.
The prophet Moshe (“Moses” in English) speaks to his people one last time before he dies and the Israelites cross the Jordan River to begin the conquest of Canaan. His speech takes up almost all of the book of Deuteronomy. Moshe repeatedly urges the Israelites to obey all the laws which he received from God and passed on to them. He also warns them to shun anything that has to do with Canaanite religious practices. But he does not rule out future Israelite prophets. Instead, he warns the Israelites—twice—not to listen to false prophets.
Signs and wonders
This week’s Torah portion, Re-eih (Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17), introduces the subject of false prophets right after a reminder not to worship Canaanite gods1 a reminder not to add (or subtract) anything from God’s laws as given to Moshe.2
Moshe assumes that when new prophets make themselves known, they will prove they are really prophets by making a prediction that immediately comes true.
When there arises in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, and he gives you an ot or a mofeit—and it comes about, the ot or the mofeit of which he spoke to you— (Deuteronomy/Devarim 13:2-3)
ot(אוֹת) = a sign; a mark.
mofeit(מוֹפֵת) = an omen; a wonder.
Most commentators follow Ramban’s clarification of the terms ot and mofeit in this passage:
“For when a prophet comes and says ‘The following [natural] matter is to represent something which is to take place’ that is termed an ot (a sign) … A mofeit (a wonder), on the other hand, applies to something novel which the prophet does before us, making some change in the natural order of the world …”3
An example of a wonder is when God tells Moshe and his brother Aharon (“Aaron” in English): “When Pharaoh speaks to you, saying: ‘Give us your mofeit!’ then you will say to Aharon: ‘Take your staff and cast it down in front of Pharaoh! It will become a serpent.” (Exodus 7:9) He does, and the wonder occurs.
Moses and the Serpent, by Washington Allston, 1805
According to the Jerusalem Talmud, “If a prophet starts to prophesy, one listens to him if he gives a sign or miracle; otherwise one does not listen to him.”4
Furthermore, the sign or wonder must occur soon after the prophet has declared it. The Baal haTurim wrote: ““He would predict that the “sign” was something that would occur in short order and when it did, it would establish his credibility. … The word mofeit refers to something supernatural that this impostor performs in the presence of all his listeners immediately, again in order to establish his credibility as having contact with the supernatural.”5
A prophet who has already established his or her6 credibility on a previous occasion does not need to keep producing more signs or wonders. However, Bachya ben Asher wrote, “If a single detail of what the claimant promised did not materialize, it is certain that he is not a prophet.”7
Except, wrote Bachya ben Asher, “if he will foretell a disaster in the future, and the disaster does not occur, this does not mean that he is a fraud. … When prophets predict disasters which do not occur, one does not suspect them, but attributes this to other causes, primarily that the people [who were] warned of the disaster had repented. After all, the whole purpose of the prophet’s mission is to cause people to return to God in penitence.”8
Forbidden message
The second criterion the Torah portion Re-eih gives for believing a prophet has to do with the content of the prophesy.
—and [if] it comes about, the ot or the mofeit of which he spoke to you, [and if he was] saying: “Let us walk after other gods—whom you have not known—and let us serve them,”—you must not listen to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer of dreams …” (Deuteronomy 13:3-4)
“Said R. Yose the Galilean: ‘See how far the verse goes to meet the intentions of the idolaters and grant them dominion; even if they halt the sun, moon, stars and constellations in their courses, hearken not to them!’”9
Apparently it is safe to believe in prophets who establish credibility and then tell the Israelites to do something that is consistent with the laws of the Torah. According to Tze-enah Ure-enah: “When he gives you great signs and wonders, he may have done this by magic. However, when a prophet says to you that you should fulfill the commandments, … then you may follow him, since he acted as a prophet and is still pious and does not follow his desires.”10
However, any prophet who tells people to serve other gods is urging them to violate Torah law. Rambam wrote:
“Therefore, if a prophet should arise and perform signs and great miracles and endeavour to controvert the prophecy of Moses our teacher, we may not hearken to him and we may be sure that those signs were performed through trickery and sorcery.”11
Hirsch added: “In any event, not only permitting idolatry, but also abolishing one of the [commands] of the Torah, is beyond the authority of a prophet …”12
Testing and omniscience
Then why does God let the false prophet’s signoccur? And why does God let a false prophet perform a supernatural wonder? The Torah answers:
… because God, your God, is testing you, to know: Is there love for God, your God, in all your mind and all your being? (Deuteronomy 13:4)
The implication is that God is not omniscient, and does not know whether a person will continue to cling to God when the “facts” seem to support the prophet who rejects God. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God’s knowledge is vast, but does not include what will happen in the future. The prophecies God gives to true prophets only predict what will happen if people do not change their ways.
Furthermore, the God of the Hebrew Bible has to make a special effort to find out what is going on inside human minds. Even Psalm 139, which says “you understand my purpose from afar” also begs: “Examine me, God, and know my mind; test me, and know my thoughts!”13
Even in the Middle Ages, not all rabbinic commentators believed God is omniscient regarding human thoughts.14 But those who were dedicated to the belief that God is omniscient were determined to find reasons why God would test people’s love for God. Wouldn’t God already know?
Rashbam wrote that the purpose of God’s test is to give people an opportunity to “accumulate merits in God’s books. Refusing to believe such false prophets is in itself a good deed.”15
Others claimed that the purpose of God’s test is to show the rest of the world how much the Israelites love God. Rambam phrased it this way:
“… know that God intends thereby to prove to the nations how firmly you believe in the truth of God’s word, and how well you have comprehended the true Essence of God; that you cannot be misled by any tempter to corrupt your faith in God. Your religion will then afford a guidance to all who seek the truth, and of all religions man will choose that which is so firmly established that it is not shaken by the performance of a miracle.”16
Whether God is omniscient or not, this verse assumes that God has the power (and interest, and attention to details) to prevent a false prophet’s prediction about a sign or wonder from coming true.
Death penalty
The Torah portion continues with Moshe’s declaration that the Israelites must follow, revere, obey, listen to, serve, and cling to only their own God.17
Then comes the penalty for being a false prophet.
And that prophet or that dreamer of dreams you must put to death, because he has spoken defection against God, your God … to drive you away from the way that God, your God, commanded you to walk in. Then you will burn out the evil from your midst! (Deuteronomy 13:6)
Chayim ibn Attar explained that the death penalty applies to such a prophet “even though he himself had not insisted that the people engage in idolatry, but had left the decision up to them and to their interpretation of the miracle’s meaning. Although the people themselves had freely decided to engage in worship of such a deity, the ‘prophet’ is still guilty …”18
Persuading others to worship another god in addition to the God of Israel always deserves the death penalty, according to the Torah portion Re-eih. The next few verses say:If your brother, your mother’s son, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is like your own soul, entices you in secret, saying, “Come let us worship other gods” … then you must stone him to death with stones, because he sought to drive you away from God, your God … and all Israel will hear and be afraid, and they will not continue do like this evil thing in your midst! (Deuteronomy 13:7, 13:11-12)
Some people today follow more than one religion, finding them all compatible with an underlying spirituality. If their religions refer to a god, they assume it is the same god going by different names.
This concept would be unthinkable to the scribes who wrote the Hebrew Bible. In their worldview, all other people’s gods are anathema. Whether the God whose name is Y-H-V-H is the only god, the best god, or the God of Israel, all Israelites and eventually all human beings must serve only Y-H-V-H.
Ramban is the acronym of 13th-century Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, a.k.a. Nachmanides. Translation in www.sefaria.org.
Talmud Yerushalmi, Sanhedrin 11:6:3, translated by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz in the William Davidson Talmud, www.sefaria.org.
Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (c. 1269 – c. 1343), known as Ba’al haTurim, Tur HaArokh, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Four female prophets are named in the Hebrew Bible: Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Devorah (Judges 4:4), Chuldah (2 Kings 22:14), and No-adyah (Nehemiah 6:14).
14th century rabbi Bachya ben Asher, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Ibid.
Sifra, c.250 – c.350 CE, quoted in Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Devarim, translated by Aryeh Newman, The World Zionist Organization, 1980, p. 127.
Tze-enah Ure-enah, 17th century Yiddish commentary, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Rambam (acronym of Rabbi Moshe Maimon, a.k.a. Maimonides), Mishneh Torah, translation in Leibowitz, ibid., p. 131.
19th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Devarim, translated by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 275.
Psalm 139:2 and 23.
E.g. Avraham ibn Daud, 12th century, or Ralbag (Rabbi Levi ben Gershon), 14th century.
Rashbam (acronym of 12th-century rabbi Shmuel ben Meir), translation in www.sefaria.org.
Rambam/Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedlander, Dover Publications, New York, 1956, Part III ch. 24, p. 304.
Deuteronomy 13:5.
18th-century rabbi Chayim ibn Attar, Or Hachayim, translation in www.sefaria.org.
The Shema and the three excerpts from the Torah that follow it are one of the oldest obligatory Jewish prayers. According to the Talmud, priests recited them aloud at the second Jerusalem temple until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.1 After that, the Shema section became a regular part of all morning and evening prayer services.
The Shema itself is a single sentence:
Shema, Israel: God is our god; God is one. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:4)
Next comes Deuteronomy 6:5-9, a paragraph that urges individuals to remember to love God at all times. (See my post: Va-etchanan: Utmost Love?)
The second paragraph of the Shema section comes from this week’s Torah portion, Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25). In this excerpt, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, God promises rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience.
The third paragraph, Numbers/Bemidbar 14:37-41, calls for tassels (tzitzit) as a reminder to keep our attention on God. (See my post Shelach-Lekha: Glimpses of Blue.)
The second paragraph of the Shema section is the most problematic of the three, because the reasons it gives for obeying God’s rules are three questionable if-then statements.
1. If you love and obey God, then you get rain and crops
And it will be, if you truly heed My commands that I am commanding to you today, to love God, your god, and to serve [God] with your whole mind and your whole being— (Deuteronomy 11:13)
All of the second person pronouns in this verse are plural; God is addressing all the Israelites.
This “if” clause certainly refers to heeding and obeying God’s commands. But which commands? All the laws in the Torah? The laws in Deuteronomy? Or just the command in this verse: to love and serve God with your whole mind and being?
For some classic commentators, it does not matter, because the way to love and serve God is to follow all of God’s commands in the Torah.But for others, loving God is also a feeling or frame of mind.2
According to S.R. Hirsch, studying Torah leads both to loving God, and to serving God by performing God’s commands:
“Hearkening to the commandments and absorbing them in the mind and will shall engender [love], complete devotion to God, which regards this devotion itself and the resulting nearness of God as the supreme goal of all endeavors. Hearkening to the commandments shall also engender [service], active furtherance of God’s purposes on earth.”3
However, N. Leibowitz pointed out that although a lone individual can love God, serving God by obeying God’s commands requires more: a community.
“Love of God is a matter for the individual who strives to attain it through self-perfection, whilst the acceptance of the yoke of mizvot [God’s commands] and their fulfillment is only conceivable in human society. … ‘my commandments’, which, for the most part, relate to the life of man amidst society and his bonds with his family, friends, the state and the human race.”4
In the next two verses, God gives the reward for love and service:
—then I will give rain to your land at the right times, autumn-rain and spring-rain, and you will gather your grain and your new wine and your fresh olive oil. And I will put grass in your field for your livestock, and you will eat and you will be sated. (Deuteronomy 11:14-15)
Rain, print by Hiroshige, 19th century, detail
The second person pronoun in “your land” is plural; it means the land of all the Israelites. But the rest of the second person pronouns are singular, addressing each Israelite individually. Nevertheless, rain covers a whole area; it does not stop at the boundary of one farm, skip the next farm, and resume falling on the land of the next virtuous farmer.
Is the timing of rainfall even up to God? The Torah certainly attributes droughts to God’s deliberate decisions. And Hirsch wrote: “Rainfall is always an act of God’s direct providence and not solely the result of the working of the laws of nature, which God originally established once and for all. The primary cause is God’s providence.”5
Yet we all know that loving, serving, and obeying God does not always result in beneficial rain—or a full stomach. One explanation is that God is still addressing the whole community of Israelites, as in the preceding verse, the “if” clause. If too many individuals ignore or reject God, the whole community will suffer.
Ramban wrote: “The explanation of the matter is as follows: God does not always perform miracles—every time giving the rain of the Land … or, on the contrary, shutting up the heaven and drying up the Land—except according to the deeds of the majority of the people.”6
Indeed, the God-character in the Torah often wipes out the innocent with the guilty, through epidemics and through wars as well as though droughts.7
2. If you disobey God, then you get drought and famine
The if-then promise of good agricultural weather for loving and obeying God is followed by an if-then threat. Here is the “if” clause:
Be on guard against yourselves, because if your minds are tempted, and you turn away and serve other gods and bow down to them— (Deuteronomy 11:16)
The second person pronouns in this verse are all plural, addressing the Israelites collectively. Here is the “then” clause:
—then the heat of God’s anger will be against you, and it will shut up the heavens, and rain will not happen, and the land will not give its produce, and you will quickly perish from the good land that God is giving to you. (Deuteronomy 11:17)
Again, the second person pronouns are all plural. God’s punishments, as well as God’s rewards, are collective.
Then how can individual Israelites who serve and worship only the God of Israel avoid group punishment? In next week’s Torah portion, God orders people to report, judge, and execute any Israelite who is caught worshiping another god.8 If a community polices itself, God will not have to withhold the necessary rain.
All the Israelites know that worshiping other gods is the worst crime against the God of Israel—prohibited in the first of the Ten Commandments that were given at Mount Sinai9 as well as in Leviticus.10 Yet some Israelites are always tempted to be unfaithful to God, and deceive themselves about the consequences.
Sometimes, when the Israelites worship other gods, God does punish them with drought and famine.11 On other occasions, God punishes them with a plague, as in the story of the Golden Calf at Mount Sinai.12 After they reached the steppe above the Jordan River, where they are still camped, God afflicted them with a plague because many Israelite men worshiped Baal-Peor.13 Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, God punishes the Israelites by arranging for an enemy to conquer them.14
Furthermore, a drought is not always a punishment. Sometimes God causes a drought even though there is no mention of Israelites doing anything wrong.15
So the crime of worshiping other gods is not always followed by a drought in the bible. Nor has it usually been followed by a drought during the last 2,500 years.
3. If you remember God, then you get an increase in your days
After that, the excerpt from the Torah portion Eikev that is recited as the second paragraph of the Shema section calls for reminders to serve and worship only God:
And you must place these words on your mind and on your being, and you must tie them for a sign on your hand, and they must be for tefillin between your eyes. And you must teach them to your children, by speaking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you must write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 11:18-20)
In this passage, the second person pronoun is plural through “And you must teach them to your children”. It switches to the singular “you” in the verse (Deuteronomy 11:19) about how you teach them to your children—perhaps because it is quoting Deuteronomy 6:7, which is in the first paragraph of the Shema section. “And you must write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates” is an exact quote of Deuteronomy 6:9, in the first paragraph of the Shema section, and both use second person singular pronouns.
The order to set up these reminders is like the “if” in an “if-then” statement. The implied “then”, the reward for doing so, concludes the excerpt:
So that your days will increase, and the days of your children, upon the land that God swore to your fathers, to give to them kimei the heavens over the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:21)
kimei(כִּימֵי) = like days of, as days of. (ki, כִּי = like, as; because; that + yemei, יְמֵי = days. Kimei is also translated “as long as the days of” and “as long as there is”.)
The second person pronouns in this final verse are all plural.
What reward is God promising here?
The Hebrew bible often uses “days” for indefinite periods of time—the way English uses the word “years”. Therefore many commentators have interpreted the verse as promising that individuals who obey these instructions will live longer. Rashi wrote: “Women are also obligated to put mezuzot [boxes containing God’s words affixed to door jambs] on their homes when no man shares the home they live in. This is logical, seeing that they too wish to enjoy long life.”16
On the other hand, this verse uses second person plural pronouns, addressing the Israelites collectively. Throughout history, some devout people have died young. And the generally longer lifespans of our time are due to advances in medicine, not to a general increase in devotion of God. Perhaps the reward for setting up reminders of God and teaching your children to remember God is not an increase in the number of days of life, but an increase in the quality of those days. Perhaps then our days increase because they are fuller and richer. According to HaKtav VeHaKabalah, God is promising years that are “like a taste of the World to Come. When you are in the land you will live true life, like the life that is in heaven.”17
I believe that God does not monitor our love, service, and worship, and apportion rain and drought accordingly. But if society as a whole does not put the welfare of our planet first, loving and serving the earth God created, then meteorological disasters do follow. Collectively, we humans have deceived ourselves into worshiping short-term financial profit. Because of this modern idolatry, we have changed the climate of the earth, and the results include both flooding in some areas, and drought and wildfires in others.
What words do we need to keep in our minds and teach to our children? The words in the Shema section are good, but I think we should also set up continual reminders saying “You must love your neighbor as yourself”18 and “You must love [the stranger] as yourself.”19 If everyone in the world repeated these words, in their own languages, day after day, eventually our behavior would change. Then all people would be able to eat and be sated. And maybe the days of all people would have an increase in happiness—like a taste of heaven on earth.
We are commanded to love God to the utmost in this week’s Torah portion, Va-etchanan (Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11). This command is a key moment in the Shema section of Jewish evening and morning prayer services, which quotes Deuteronomy 6:4-6:9. The prayer begins with the famous line:
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheynu, Adonai echad!
Listen, Israel: Y-H-V-H is our God; Y-H-V-H is one! (Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:4. See my post Va-etchanan: Only One.)
This is immediately followed by:
Ve-ahavtaGod, your God, with all your levav and with all your nefesh and with all your me-od. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 6:5)
ve-ahavta(וְאָהַבְתָּ) = And you must love. (The noun ahavah, אַהֲבָה = love.)
levav(לְבָב) = heart; mind (including thoughts and emotions).
nefesh(נֶפֶש) = soul, desire, being, life.
me-od(מְאֺד) = very, much; very much, very far.
Many translations of this verse turn me-od into a noun meaning “power”, “might”, or “possessions”. But in every other appearance of the word in the Hebrew Bible (except for 2 Kings 23:25, which is a direct quote of Deuteronomy 6:5), me-od is an adjective meaning “very” or “much”, or an adverb meaning “very much” or “very far”.
Ibn Ezra wrote: “It means that you should love Him to the utmost in any way that you are able. Your heart should be totally committed to the love of God.”1
How can one love God with one’s whole mind, one’s whole being, to the utmost? What does it even mean to love God?
The Chassidic rabbi Nachum Twersky wrote: “Indeed, Y-H-W-H has commanded us to love Him. But how is this possible at all, since God’s nature cannot be known? For this reason God gave us … a this-worldly reality that would serve as an example through which we could understand the truth behind it.”2
Ruth and Naomi, by Philip H. Calderon, 1886, detail
Twersky advised shifting from the love of sensual pleasures such as eating, drinking, and sex to loving God. But in the Hebrew Bible, the verb ahav(אָהַב) and noun ahavah are used far more often for loving other human beings than for loving pleasurable activities. Can we love God the way we love a human being?
The Hebrew Bible includes many examples of humans loving other humans: the ahavah between a father and his son, between lovers or spouses, and between fast friends. Some servants love their masters. The Torah also urges us to love others as we love ourselves (see below).
If love is a feeling, then loving God might mean experiencing a state of oneness with God, or a passionate obsession with God, or a deep longing for God. If love is about what we do rather than what we feel, then loving God might mean acting with loyal obedience, or with unselfishness.
Love as oneness
The first verse of the prayer states: “Y-H-V-H is one!”. This could mean that there is only one god, but it could also mean that God is oneness: the unity of everything in existence.
Two human beings have separate bodies and separate thoughts. But sometimes each one feels a deep connection and continuity with the other. This experience of love as oneness can happen between life partners, or between a parent and baby. It is not a continuous experience, but it does recur.
It is also possible to feel a deep connection with everything in existence. Many people consider this an experience of God. For that moment, they felt one with God, a part of God. I have had a few such moments in my lifetime, and I felt awe. But to some people, it feels like love.
An experience of oneness with God or the universe is fleeting. Can this transitory feeling be maintained after the moment is over?
In the 19th century, Hirsch wrote: “All your thoughts and emotions, all your wishes and aspirations, and all your possessions shall be regarded by you only as means for attaining closeness to God, for bringing God near to you; this shall be their sole value to you.”3
If it were possible to be continuously conscious of God, would that result in a continuous feeling of oneness? And would that be the utmost love for God?
Love as passonate obsession
Thinking about God every conscious minute sounds like an obsession.
Rambam wrote that passionate obsession can be increased with practice: “What is suitable love? To love God with an exceedingly great and very intense love until one’s soul is knit with the love of God and one is constantly obsessed by it. As in a state of love-sickness, in which the mind cannot be diverted from the beloved, the love is constantly obsessed by his love, lying down or rising up, eating or drinking.”4
The words “lying down or rising up” appear two verses later in the prayer from this week’s Torah portion:
And you must impress them [God’s words] upon your children, and you must speak of them when you are sitting in your house and when you are walking on the way, and when you are lying down and when you are rising up. (Deuteronomy 6:7)
Pekudah wrote: “What does the love of God consist of? The soul’s complete surrender of its own accord to the creator in order to cleave to His supernal light … then it will become completely preoccupied with His service and have no place for any other thought …”5
This surrender must be passionate. Chayim ibn Attar said that it must be more intense than sexual desire.
“It is assumed that the average man feels drawn to any woman, especially if the woman in question is pretty. The word ‘with all’ refers to the more intense desire one displays for a beautiful woman. In one’s relationship to God … one has only fulfilled the Torah’s commandment if one can honestly say that one loves Him more intensely than any woman.”6
Falling in love, hard, combines intense sexual desire with ardent devotion. But these conditions are temporary, and only when they fades do humans make thoughtful choices about the object of their passion. Can we choose to enter into a state of passionate obsession with God? Can we maintain it? Would that be the utmost love for God?
Love as longing
Other commentators have considered the longing for union with God the deepest form of love. Rambam wrote: “When man contemplates His works and His wonderful, great creatures and fathoms through them His inestimable and boundless wisdom, he will immediately love, and praise, and exalt, and will be seized by a keen longing passion to know Him …”7
The Chassidic movement among eastern European Jews in the 18th century placed a high value on longing for union with God. Rabbi Alter of Ger wrote:
“This means one should want nothing but God. … Even if it is hard for us to imagine fulfilling ‘with all your heart,’ we should still have that willful longing to reach it at all times. For it is through this longing that gates open in the human heart.”8
It is possible to induce or magnify a feeling of longing. But is constant longing the utmost love for God?
Love as loyal obedience
When the book of Deuteronomy was written, perhaps in the 7th century B.C.E., the word ahavah, “love”, could also mean loyalty. Treaties that called for vassals to love their overlords with all their heart meant that the vassals must be totally loyal.
This definition of love provides one answer to the question “How can love be commanded?” Our emotions may not be entirely under our own control, but we can freely choose, over and over again, to act with loyalty. We can choose to remain committed to a spouse or obedient to a boss even if our desires pull us in another direction.
Similarly, we can choose to remain committed to our religion and obedient to God’s commands in the Torah—even if it kills us, as in this story from the Talmud:
“One time, after the bar Kokheva rebellion, the evil empire of Rome decreed that Israel may not engage in the study and practice of Torah. Pappos ben Yehuda came and found Rabbi Akiva, who was convening assemblies in public and engaging in Torah study. … When they took Rabbi Akiva out to be executed, it was time for the recitation of Shema. And they were raking his flesh with iron combs, and he was reciting Shema … His students said to him: Our teacher, even now, as you suffer, you recite Shema? He said to them: All my days I have been troubled by the verse: With all your soul, meaning: Even if God takes your soul. I said to myself: When will the opportunity be afforded me to fulfill this verse? Now that it has been afforded me, shall I not fulfill it?”9
But later commentators pointed out that loyalty and obedience can come from fear as well as love. Rashi wrote that obeying God’s commands out of loyal love is better than obeying God out of fear. “He who serves his master out of fear, if he (the master) troubles him overmuch, leaves him and goes away.”10
Bachya ben Asher wrote: ““The point of “loving God” is to perform His commandments out of a sense of love for Him. If someone serves the Lord out of fear, his service is not of the best variety. The way this love for God expresses itself is by our studying the laws of the Torah and by obtaining a better understanding of what God expects from us through such study. As a result of such study we will enjoy having gained deeper insights of what the Lord wants from us.”11
If someone today is utterly committed to obeying God’s commands in the Torah, does this count as loving God?
Love as unselfishness
Love is also an action rather than a feeling when we unselfishly promote someone else’s welfare. Loving parents make what is good for their children a priority. Loving partners set aside some selfish desires to help the other and to make the relationship the priority.
This way of loving is implied in the commands: “And you must love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), “The immigrant who resides with you, you must love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34), and “You must love the immigrant, because you were immigrants in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19).
The Torah does not ask us to be compassionate toward God. But some selfish desires can be sacrificed in order to do what we believe God wants. According to Sforno, “… you will then enjoy doing things which are pleasing to Him, when you understand that there is nothing in this world which is more worth doing.”12
Can this view of love as giving the other priority over one’s selfish desires be applied to God? And does it count as loving God?
When I say the Shema, then read “And you must love God with all your mind, and with all your being, and with all your utmost”, my immediate thought is that it’s too hard. I just don’t have the inner means to do it—whether I define love as an experience of oneness, or a passionate obsession, or deep longing, or acting with loyal obedience, or unselfishly putting God first.
Yet I have loved a few human beings in all of those ways. Perhaps I would be able to follow the commandment to love God if I believed in an anthropomorphic god. Yet even if I did, I cannot imagine loving God—or any human being, for that matter—every waking minute.
What can I do? I can contemplate the wonders of the universe, of which I am a part. I can sing prayers with feeling, embracing passion and longing. I can commit to a leading a moral life, according to a code with roots in the Torah but details provided by my own conscience. And, I believe, I can serve God by being kind and unselfish with other human beings. That is the utmost I am able do to love God. But does it count?
12th-century rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Menahem Nahum Twersky of Chernobyl, Me-or Eynayim, 1798, translated by Arthur Green, Speaking Torah, vol. 2, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2013, p. 96.
19th century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Devarim, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, p. 110.
Rambam (the acronym of 12th century rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides), Teshuva, quoted by Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Devarim, translated by Aryeh Newman, World Zionist Organization, 1980, p. 67.
Bachya ibn Pekudah, 1050-1120 CE, Duties of the Heart, quoted by Leibowitz, ibid., p. 68.
18th-century rabbi Chayim ibnAttar, Or HaChayim, translation in www.sefaria.org.
Rambam, Yesodey Ha-Torah, quoted by Leibowitz, ibid., p. 66.
Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, Sfaat Emet, 1808, translated by Arthur Green, The Language of Truth, Jewish Publication Society, 1998.
Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 61b, translation by Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, The William Davidson Talmud, in www.sefaria.org.
Rashi (the acronym of 11th-century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki), translation in www.sefaria.org.
14th century rabbi Bachya ben Asher, translation in www.sefaria.org.
16th-century rabbi Ovadiah Sforno, translation in www.sefaria.org.
